“You row like one,” sneered the other boy. “Blundering all over the river like that! Don’t you suppose there are other fellows around here besides you, you silly fool?”
The skiff had floated slowly away, scraping in the twilight against the overhanging branches, but now Monty pulled it back until it was once more alongside the canoe, and he could grasp the gunwale of the latter. “Say, partner, I can’t see your face,” he replied, in the drawl that came naturally to him when he was angry, “and so I don’t know whether you smiled when you said that.”
“What if I didn’t?”
“Nothing, except that I’ll reach over and grab you, Harold.”
“Try it, won’t you?” The voice sounded really eager.
“Sure!” answered Monty. As he got to his feet in the swaying skiff he thought that perhaps this cocky youth might not be such a bad sort after all. In Monty’s present mood a scrap seemed the most desirable thing in life, and that the other fellow was apparently of his way of thinking amounted almost to a bond of sympathy. But Monty didn’t take as much time for these reflections as I have taken to record them, for he was essentially prompt in his undertakings. So, too, was the boy in the canoe, for he also was on his feet now, and when Monty made a sudden lunge for him his fist shot out, and only Monty’s quick duck of the head made the blow harmless. The next moment, gripping each other across the sides of the craft, they were struggling mightily.
“Over you go, Monkey Face!” grunted Monty.
“I reckon—you’ll go—too!” panted the other.
Wrestling under such conditions is a precarious undertaking, and presents novel difficulties. As the boys leaned together their crafts in the most natural way in the world slowly parted until presently Monty was on his knees on the gunwale, and his adversary, no longer able to stand up, became a dead weight in his arms.